Thursday, November 21, 2013

LEP Checklist for your language evaluations--free download

When I first started in education, children who did not speak English as a primary language were a novelty. People stared at the kids as though they had three legs!

Times have changed. Now speaking a different language is almost the norm.

The question for us as SLPs has become how to evaluate the kids for speech/language disorders. I can't answer that question here, but can offer you one tool to help in preparing for a language evaluation. In our school system, we are fortunate to have a Spanish speaking speech-language pathologist, Jennifer Kirschner, CCC-SLP, who assesses our Spanish speaking children. She has created a checklist and questionnaire for teachers to fill out prior to an evaluation. It's important to note that the teacher is asked to compare these kids to children of similar backgrounds (as opposed to comparing them to native English speakers). This checklist is an excellent tool in seeing how the children are progressing, and accessing the regular curriculum. A speech pathologist can use this for LEP children speaking any language.

It's so important to gather all the data you can for children who don't speak English at home. The last thing an SLP wants to do is to misidentify a child as having a language disorder, when the child is only struggling with learning English. This is one tool to help in the process.Click here to download the checklist in pdf